Cryptocurrency exchange owner's death blocks $140m access to funds

Over $140m of cryptocurrencies are trapped in limbo following the death of Gerald Cotten, the owner of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX.

What happens to your passwords and access to your online accounts when you die? Banks have the authority to handle assets of the deceased on behalf of their beneficiaries and many websites will transfer access to family members in order to let them access critical documents. But what about the private keys and passwords in a cryptographically secured computer system?

That's the dilemma currently being faced by Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga. The organisation's owner Gerald Cotten died in December 2018, and the laptop on which he did company work has been cryptographically secured due to the sensitive nature of his work on the exchange. No-one has been able to access the laptop since Cotten's death, and the results have been disasterous.

Among other things, the laptop contains the private key to the exchange's master cryptocurrency wallets. Anyone can deposit money into the exchange by using a wallet's public key, but withdrawals have to be processed using the private key to ensure only the owner of a wallet can spend the money in it. Losing that key means that around $140m of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum are now trapped in an account that nobody can access.